


Dairine in the Brownstone

by lizzieraindrops



Category: Elementary (TV), Young Wizards - Diane Duane
Genre: Bees, F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Moments, Multiple Points of View, Other, Tea, interludes, partnerships
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-10-29
Updated: 2013-10-29
Packaged: 2017-12-30 20:13:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1022908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lizzieraindrops/pseuds/lizzieraindrops
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dairine takes the inter-universal subway (from DD’s 'Uptown Local') to another New York and literally runs into Joan Watson. Tea with Joan, Sherlock, and Clyde ensues. Set offstage during the unseen interludes of AWOM and early season 2. Minimal plot; just tea, reflections, and brief brushes of worlds.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dairine in the Brownstone

There was a _bang_ of displaced air in the backyard, the creak and clatter of the screen door, followed by slow footsteps on the stairs.

"That you, Dair?" Nita called through the open door of her room from where she lay on her bed reading.

"Yeah," said a tired voice still halfway down the stairs.

"You're back from Wellakh earlier than usual. Everything okay?" Nita asked.

Dairine paused to give Nita a neutral, deadpan stare through the doorway as she reached the top of the stairs. "Yeah, it's fine." She continued trudging past to her own room. She looked so worn down, with her head slightly bowed and her backpack slung heavily over one shoulder.

Nita sat up on her bed.  "Are _you_ okay?" Silence. Nita got up, set her manual down on the dresser, and followed Dairine to her room, where she was pulling a wriggling Spot out of her black backpack.

Nita leaned on the doorframe. "Dairine?"

"Neets..." Dairine sighed and set Spot down on the floor. "Can you just... not?"

"I'm worried about you," Nita said. "You've been spending so much time on Wellakh, and then you come home all tired and you don't talk about... anything."

Dairine watched Spot scuttle under her bed. "I really don't want to talk right now." There was some rustling and crackling as Spot pushed through whatever debris might be hidden under there.

"Did something happen with Nelaid?" Nita asked, watching a crumpled silver gum wrapper roll out from under the bed.

"No, Neets," Dairine said. "Nothing _happened_. Some days are just harder than others. Would you just give me some space?" She prodded the gum wrapper with the rubber toe of her yellow canvas shoe.

"The opposite arm of the galaxy isn't enough space?" Nita asked with a brief, small smile. She wouldn't get Dairine to talk, not in this mood. "Tell you what," she said as a sudden idea occurred to her. "Why don't you take that other subway token I got from Tom and visit another New York? Another universe might be a nice break."

Dairine looked up, her eyes unreadable. "Actually, it might be," she said after a thinking about it. Her eyes momentarily flicked down to the edge of the bed and Spot immediately ran out, stopping with one crabby leg perched on her shoe. "Would you mind me borrowing it?"

"Not at all. I didn't have any plans to use it anytime soon, it's just sitting around. Feel free to use it whenever you want." Nita walked back to her room to fish the heavy golden token out of her sock drawer. "Just don't... I don't recommend going anywhere, you know... that involves errantry. Just take it easy. And, uh... come back for dinner, hey?"

"Okay," Dairine said in a resigned and mildly exasperated tone. She reappeared in Nita's doorway slinging her backpack over her shoulder again. Spot poked a couple of silvery eyes out through the gap between the zippers of the main pocket.

"Here you go," Nita said, reaching out to drop the coin into Dairine's upturned palm. "Have fun."

"Okay," Dairine said again, and started down the stairs. "Hey Neets," she said, pausing to look back up at her. "Thanks." She held Nita's eyes a moment longer and then turned away.

"No problem," Nita said. She wanted to say something else, but couldn't figure out what. Spot was looking back and blinking up at her as Dairine descended the stairs again. Then the screen door creaked and slammed again, and with another _bang_ , she was gone.

 

***

 

The subway platform was dark and cool after the warm, bright afternoon above ground. Dairine had used her 'universal' token to go through the turnstile; even though the subway had long since stopped using tokens, it somehow worked, and the coin reappeared in the right hip pocket of her cargo pants once she was through. The first subway that appeared looked fairly normal, except for the easily readable graffiti. Nita had said that these subways (and the places they stopped) had looked rather unusual when she and Kit had gone on them awhile ago, but today was just one of those off days for Dairine.

She boarded and held onto a pole as the subway started moving sluggishly. _Where are we going?_ Spot asked her silently.

 _I don't know_ , Dairine replied.

 _Are we trying to go anywhere particular?_ Spot inquired. Nita and Kit had spent some time on these subways, using their imaginations to lead them to particular kinds of New Yorks.

 _Not really_ , thought Dairine. _Just somewhere... else._ She let her mind unfocus, trying to let the confusion of the day wash away from her.

The subway soon stopped at an utterly mundane-looking, grey, grimy platform. Dairine almost decided to wait for a more interesting-looking stop, but some fluttering yellow flyers on a bulletin board caught her eye. _Why not_ , she thought, and hopped off the subway just before the doors closed.

She walked over to look at a flyer. URBAN HONEY FOR SALE, it read, PRODUCED BY A SMALL LOCAL APIARY. CONTACT - the bottom of the page was ragged where small strips with contact information had all been torn off. Dairine looked at another of the flyers, and found two copies of a phone number still clinging to it. She pulled one off and put it in her pocket, just in case.

She walked up the stairs to find a New York that could easily have been part of her own, albeit in an area of Brooklyn she wasn't familiar with. In fact, the only way she could tell this New York wasn't her own was the cool, cloudy weather enveloping the place, in contrast to the sunny afternoon she had left behind. She looked up at the amorphous gray clouds as she exited the stairs, wondering if it would rain, and whether it was possible to retrieve a jacket from a closet in another universe if it did -

_Crash._

Dairine had run headlong into a woman in a grey peacoat and a knitted beret cap, and they both now sprawled on the ground just above the stairs. The woman had been carrying a stack of large, heavy books, one of which had hit Dairine in the head on its way down. She had also been carrying a small stack of yellow fliers which now fluttered all around them. They were fresh copies of the urban honey fliers. Judging by this and by the hefty copy of _Innovations in Urban Beekeeping_ that had left a cut on Dairine's forehead, this woman was the beekeeper, and she had probably been on her way to replace the depleted fliers on the bulletin board downstairs.

"Ow. Are you alright?" the woman said from where she was rolling over onto her knees.

"Agh. Yes," Dairine said. "Sorry, I wasn't looking where I was going." She stumbled to her feet, feeling rather foolish. _Great_ , she thought. _Just like the Crossings. Can't go anywhere new without nearly killing myself. You okay, Spot?_

_Yes. Just a bit rattled._

"I guess I wasn't paying attention either. Sorry about that," the woman said. She also got to her feet, propping herself up on her high-heeled ankle boots, resettling her beret over her long dark hair, and starting to single-mindedly gather up her books. Dairine kneeled down to pick up the flyers, tapped them on the concrete to line them up neatly, and handed them back to her.

"Thanks," she said distractedly, not looking at Dairine.

"You're the beekeeper," Dairine said. "I saw these flyers of yours downstairs."

"Yes, well, it's more my roommate that does the actual beekeeping, I just put the flyers out when I - oh no, you're bleeding," she said, finally noticing that her book had tried to put Dairine out of action. She shifted the books to hold them with one arm, set the flyers on top of them, and reached out her other arm to push Dairine's hair back and examine her head, her thumb resting lightly along her hairline next to the cut. The suddenness, familiarity, and unselfconsciousness of the gesture startled Dairine, but she didn't pull away. She had the odd impression that this woman might just chase her down and force her to eat chicken soup if she tried to brush off her concern. It was not an unfamiliar impression, but... it had been a few years.

"Hmm, this might need stitches, I can't tell," the woman said. "I'm so sorry. Here, why don't you just come right around the corner and I'll get a better look at it and patch you up? I live right by here."

"Uhh..." Dairine said. She almost decided to decline and go back down the stairs to head home and call it a day, but this woman just looked genuinely concerned. "Okay," Dairine said. _Besides_ , she thought, _Spot can run a defensive spell routine faster than mad beekeepers or their bees can attack, if it comes to that._

The woman nodded. "It's right over here," she said, picking up her flyers with her free hand so they didn't blow away. She turned to walk past the stairs to the subway and led Dairine around the corner of the block and up the front steps of a brownstone apartment.

"Here, could you hold these again?" She asked, handing Dairine the fliers so that she didn't drop them all again while she rummaged in her bag for her keys. "I'm Joan, by the way," she said as she opened the door.

"Dairine. Nice to meet you." Dairine followed her through the double doorway into a little foyer opening onto a set of stairs and what looked like a living room. She heard a muffled chatter from upstairs that sounded like both the television and the radio on at the same time.

"Sherlock, you home?" Joan called up the stairs.

"'Sherlock?'" Dairine said incredulously.

"My roommate. I know, odd name, isn't it?" Joan said. "I don't know what his parents were up to. His brother's name is Mycroft."

"But..." Dairine began, but she was interrupted by a man's voice echoing down the stairs.

"Excellent, Watson, you're back. Did you find the book at the library?"

"Watson?" Dairine said, thinking, _They can't be serious._

"Yes I did, but we have company," Joan called back. "Could you come downstairs and put the kettle on?" She hung her coat and hat on a hook near the door. "You like tea, right?" Joan asked her.

"Fine," came the reply from upstairs. The radio/TV chatter abruptly stopped.

"Wait, you're not..." Dairine said as a skinny man in a t-shirt and a buttoned vest trotted briskly down the stairs.

"Not what?" he said, standing at the base of the stairs with pink zebra-striped socks poking out from below the hem of his jeans.

"Uh, nothing," Dairine said, and she turned to follow Joan through the living room into the kitchen.

 

***

_This is beyond weird_ , Dairine thought. _I've somehow gotten into an alternate universe just like mine, except here Sherlock Holmes exists and lives in New York with Watson,_ Joan _Watson at that._

 _Not all universes are so wildly different from the one where we live,_ Spot said, interrupting her train of thought. _Is it so unlikely that there are some similar to ours, where things that are fictional for us are real?_

 _I suppose not,_ Dairine thought. _But why did we end up in one?_ She sat at the kitchen table, her backpack with Spot in it leaning against the chair leg. Sherlock was putting the copper kettle he had just filled onto the stove, and Joan had set her books down on the table and gone upstairs to get something.

 _Nita said that the things you carry onto the subway might influence where you go,_ said Spot. _Do you have anything that would evoke Sherlock Holmes?_

 _It's not like I carry the entire works of Arthur Conan Doyle around with me,_ Dairine thought irritably. _And if I did, I'd let_ you _carry them as ebooks. Are you sure it's not something in your memory that did it?_

 _I think it has to be a physical object or direct intent,_ Spot said, _And your intentions on the subway were distinctly vague. What's in your pockets?_

Dairine censused the content of her pockets through the fabric of her pants instead of emptying them, in case she was carrying any hard-to-explain wizardly trinkets that she had forgotten. She felt the round disk of the subway token and the rustle of the phone number from the flyer in her right hip pocket, plus some grit in the bottom corner that was probably just dirt. Her left hip pocket held some crinkly plastic candy wrappers, one of which still contained what was most likely a piece of butterscotch. The rectangle of her thin wallet was in the left leg pocket of her cargo pants, but there was nothing in there but a few dollar bills, her school ID and a library card. _Don't think that would count,_ Dairine thought. _It probably needs to be something more specific, something iconic -_

She remembered what was in her right leg pocket before she touched it. It was one of those cheap collapsible magnifying glasses, one she'd accidentally brought home from science class years ago. She undid the velcro on the pocket and pulled the glass out, twisting it open. It was scratched from years of examining bugs and residency in various pockets, but it was still mostly clear. She had taken it to Wellakh this morning to show Nelaid how to make burned designs with it using the sun's light. For some reason, this was something the Wellakhit people had never thought of doing. (Now that she thought of it, it probably had something to do with their cultural memory of the fear of burning.) She'd thought it might be fun, and although Nelaid had acted interested, it had just been... awkward. She was sure Roshaun would have been fascinated, but his father had been merely politely perplexed. _Why did I even show him that?_ _What a stupid idea. I just had to make things weird,_ Dairine thought, setting the glass down on the table. _Then again, me going there is never going to_ not _be weird._ Things had been hard enough lately, but she'd had to leave early today because the strange, dissonant encounter had left her too disoriented to focus on the delicate exercises she was practicing with the mini-model Thahit. She'd nearly forgotten to add a crucial chord to the spell diagram, one that would have had unpleasant results with the model and fatal ones with the star itself. _Maybe this wasn't such a good idea after all. But I need to learn how to use the Sunstone..._

 _Well, now we know,_ Spot said.

"Do you mind oolong tea?" Holmes asked Dairine abruptly as the kettle started whistling, interrupting her reverie. "Watson keeps buying it, I'm trying to get rid of it." His British accent was crisp and clipped.

"Yeah, sure," Dairine said. Anything that wasn't Aunt Annie's endless black tea.

"Mmm," Holmes said. He dropped some tea leaves into a strainer and placed them in a teapot, pouring hot water over them from the gleaming kettle. Dairine was bemusedly watching him tuck a pom-pommed tea cozy around the pot just as Joan came back downstairs, her arms filled with plastic bottles, packets of gauze and a box of band-aids.

"Thanks for making tea, Sherlock," she said as she collapsed into a chair at the table with her medical paraphernalia. "Also, could you stop putting Legos in my medical bag? I can't find anything in it. Get yourself your own suitcase to threaten people with and put them in there."

 _He threatens people with Legos in suitcases?_ Dairine thought.

 _Well, it's not a reference to canon,_ Spot said.

_And you know this because Legos didn't exist in the late 1800s?_

_No. Because I just downloaded the entire freely available works of Arthur Conan Doyle and did a search._

 

***

 

The girl stared down at her backpack and heaved a small, frustrated sigh.

"Sorry I took so long," Joan said, unscrewing a bottle of iodine.

"Oh, no, it's not you," she said, looking up apologetically. "It's just... been one of those days."

"Oh. Okay," Joan said. She hesitated, holding a piece of gauze to the mouth of the bottle and briefly inverting it to soak it, then said: "Feel free to talk to me about it, if you want."

Dairine made an exasperated, scrunched face that was strikingly familiar to Joan. Sherlock glanced over and chuckled.

"Not everyone wants fixing, Watson, even those who need it. You know that," he said. Dairine gave him a confused, dismayed look.

"He's talking about himself, Dairine," Joan said placatingly. She leaned forward to wipe the blood off her forehead, pushing her bright red curls out of the way. "Here, this is just some iodine," she said, dabbing the cut with the soaked gauze. Dairine followed her hand diagonally upward with a wary eye. "Did you two introduce yourselves?" Joan asked, turning to look at Holmes with a raised eyebrow. His blank look answered for him.

"Dairine," she said, turning back to her, "This is Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock, this is Dairine...?"

"Dairine ke K- uh, Callahan. Nice to meet you." Her gray eyes ( _just like Sherlock's_ , Joan thought) were guarded and she looked uncomfortable, but whether that was the cause or the effect of stumbling over her own name, Joan didn't know. She could tell that she wasn't lying about her identity; it was something else. _As if she just touched on a memory._

"Pleased to meet you, Dairine," Sherlock said, walking over and shaking her hand briskly. "So, how were you injured? Did you try to pick Watson's pocket? You don't look the type, but then again, those who don't are usually the most successful."

"No!" Joan exclaimed. "We ran right into each other, and I dropped the books all over her. She was nice enough to help me pick up your flyers." _Really,_ Joan thought. "Just because _you_ collect minor criminals as informants doesn't mean we all do."

"Oh, very well," said Holmes. "You found the book on antique firearms at the library, then, with their specifications?" he asked, beginning to pick over the pile of books on the table.

"Yes, I did, it's right there," Joan said, reaching over to grab a worn book underneath the heavy volume on urban beekeeping that had struck Dairine. Holmes lifted the books on top of it so that Joan could pull it out of the stack and hand it to him.

She turned back to Dairine to find she was giving them both a very funny look.

"Don't worry, we're consulting detectives, not criminals," Joan said. _Great, we're freaking her out._

"I see..." Dairine said. "So, you're not a doctor?"

"Well, I was," Joan said, uncertain how much information she was actually asking for. She looked down at her hands as she screwed the cap back onto the iodine bottle.

"Don't fret, Dairine, she is more than capable of tending to the wound she inflicted upon you," said Holmes, now browsing the antique gun book and restlessly bouncing on the balls of his feet next to them. Joan rolled her eyes. "She once single-handedly removed and repaired a bullet wound to my shoulder, with absolutely no complications."

"Other than the complications of _you_ refusing pain medication and deliberately hurting yourself by hitting your wound," Joan said exasperatedly. "You don't really need any stitches, just a butterfly band-aid should do it," she told Dairine.

"Holmes and Watson..." Dairine said with an odd, wry expression. "Consulting detectives."

"Yes," Joan said, looking at her curiously while peeling apart a band-aid wrapper.

"If it's what you're asking, my dear," Holmes said, idly turning a page of his book, "we are not romantically entangled. We work together and we live here, in this brownstone." He made a half-hearted circular gesture indicating the entire apartment.

"We're more like..." Joan said, sticking the band-aid to her small head and searching for the best words to explain. "Companions, or..."

"Partners," Dairine said quietly. "Yes," she added in a clear tone of surprise. "I understand."

Joan met her eyes, feeling as surprised as Dairine looked. Dairine's gray eyes regarded her calmly, with more openness and curiosity than she had yet shown. Joan turned to glance at Sherlock and found him looking back at her, also curious. _What have we here?_ his eyebrows seemed to say.

 _How odd,_ Joan thought. _She seems as if she really does understand. And so young._ "You do?" she asked curiously.

Dairine nodded, her red hair falling forward again to partially obscure the band-aid. "I - well," she said, her face closing again. Her eyes flicked down to the table, then down to her backpack, then back up to meet Joan's cautiously. "I've had a partner. And my sister, so does she. They do a lot of work together... but, they're kind of different. Anyway, I guess I know what you mean."

Joan didn't know what to make of that, but she nodded. The girl obviously didn't want to be pressed about it. "Well," Joan said, "would you like some tea?"

 

***

 

Joan stood up, threw the band-aid wrapper and gauze into the trash, and washed her hands. Dairine watched as she picked the tea strainer out of the pot and grabbed a few mugs from the cabinet. "Would you like any, Sherlock?" Joan asked.

"No, not that kind. It's not tea," he said. He had stolen her chair at the table and still had his nose in the book.

"'Tea' is anything steeped in hot water," Joan said. "This, it even comes from the same camellia plant as your 'real' tea." She brought the teapot and two mugs back to the table, pouring a cup for Dairine, then one for herself.

"Thanks," Dairine said. She wrapped her hands around the blue ceramic mug, holding its warmth close to her chest and inhaling deeply. Joan picked up her brown-and-white patterned mug and walked over to a terrarium in the corner of the room, her heels tocking softly on the wooden floor.

"Sherlock, did you feed Clyde today?" she asked.

"I tried. He would not eat his lettuce," Sherlock replied with a slight scowl on his face. Dairine got up and joined Joan next to the terrarium, looking over the top to see a small tortoise ambling around on the side of the cage opposite a pile of wilted lettuce. _Not hungry, small stuff?_ Dairine asked the tortoise silently. Although organic life had always been more Nita's department, Dairine was pretty good with reptiles.

The little tortoise paused mid-stride to look up at her with a disapproving eye. _Hungry?_ he said. _Of course I'm hungry. For_ real _food that has actual flavor._ That _stuff is nothing but tasteless, watery mush._ He made a little turtle yawn that appeared to be an expression of frustration. _It's disgusting._ He looked away from her as if from a hopeless scene and proceeded to walk the perimeter of his tank.

Dairine had to bite her lip to keep from laughing out loud. Joan looked sideways at her with a mixture of curiosity and something resembling suspicion. "Maybe he doesn't like iceberg lettuce all that much," Dairine managed to say without giggling. _I've got to be careful around her,_ she thought. _She's sharp. And I bet Sherlock is, too. Look out, Holmes and Watson are onto me._ She nearly lost control to giggles again.

 _Will you get a grip,_ Spot chided. _We don't know if this place is sevarfrith._

"He won't eat iceberg, hum?" Sherlock said from his chair at the table. "Perhaps we'll have to try some fancier greens. What a diva."

"How did you know?" Joan asked, still watching Dairine closely.

Dairine shrugged. "Just a guess. He doesn't seem real interested in it. And I've heard that iceberg isn't very good for tortoises." _We could find out if they're sevarfrith here,_ she thought to Spot.

_What method did you have in mind?_

Dairine hesitated, then asked Joan casually, "Were you on errantry earlier?" She used the Speech word for errantry, thinking that she would either recognize the term or just hear it as its usual English translation.

"Errantry?" Joan asked, her brows slightly contracted in confusion.

 _Yep, definitely sevarfrith,_ Dairine thought while mentally backpedaling. "Yeah, uh, you looked like you were really busy running errands earlier."

"Oh, yes, I suppose I was in a bit of a rush," Joan said uncertainly. _Sloppy,_ Spot commented. "The case we're working on is sort of time-dependent," Joan continued. "Our best suspect has a plane ticket to Mexico in twenty-one hours, and we still have no evidence connecting him to the murder we're investigating. I haven't learned near as much as Sherlock about antique guns yet, and there are no digital copies of the old book we were looking for, so I went to pick it up while he was chasing down another lead. Any luck?" she asked, walking back over to the table to look over Holmes' shoulder. Dairine followed and stood a short distance away on his other side, her interest piqued.

"You know my opinions on luck, Watson," Holmes said irritably, flipping through pages of ornate antique gun illustrations.

"So, nothing yet?" Joan said dryly.

"No. Wait! What's this?" His finger hovered over the illustration of a handgun with ornate metalwork as he read the accompanying text. "Yes! This would accomodate a bullet of the same unusual caliber used to kill the victim. We know he has this gun in his collection, and _this_ is enough to detain him and seize the gun for ballistics testing. I am sure it will prove a match." He jumped up excitedly.

"Great. I'll tell Gregson," Joan said, pulling her phone out of her purse, which she had dropped on the counter. "He and Bell will pick him up, and we can go help with the interrogation when they get back to the station." She tapped a text into her phone and then slipped it back into the bag. "We have a little while before we should leave." She walked back over to where Dairine stood by the table. Sherlock was fetching himself a small mug from the cabinet over the sink. "You're welcome to stay until we need to leave," Joan said to Dairine. "Do you need a cab to get home?"

"Oh!" Dairine said. "No, it's fine, I can just take the subway back." _I_ have _to take the subway back,_ she thought, _and I don't want to waste the energy for a taxi I don't need._

"Are you sure?" Joan asked. She really did look concerned. She probably felt guilty about dropping the books on Dairine in the first place.

"Yeah, I'll be fine," Dairine said. She grinned wryly. "I've been in worse fixes than this."

 _Yes, I'd say you have,_ said Spot. Joan smiled back as if she had heard his comment.

"I'll be all ready to go soon," Dairine said, watching Holmes pour tea into his cup. "Do you mind if I have another cup of tea though? This is really good."

"Go right ahead," Joan said. "I'm glad you like it!"

"You seem to have found another convert," Holmes said, sipping his tea with a superior expression. "What is the world coming to?"

Joan rolled her eyes while Dairine poured herself another cup.

 

***

 

Joan took her medical supplies back upstairs to put them back in her bag, found it still full of Legos, and sighed. She resignedly picked it up to dump the entire contents out on her bed, but stopped when she found that Sherlock had followed her upstairs.

"Yes?" Joan said, sitting the bag down on her bed.

"Who is that girl?" he asked. He stood just inside the doorway with his cup of tea.

"I honestly don't know," Joan said. "We literally just ran into each other. She got that cut on her head, and - well, I guess old habits die hard. I brought her back here to fix it up."

Sherlock crinkled his face into a pensive expression. "She is... reticient."

Joan nearly laughed out loud. She smiled and said, "It's not like I've never dealt with that before."

"Perhaps. But she is concealing something. She tripped over her own tongue when introducing herself. She has used an alias surname before, probably one similar to her own."

"Please don't tell me you think she's a junior criminal mastermind," Joan said. She lay the iodine, gauze, and band-aids in the top of her bag and zipped it up, resolving to organize it later. "For all we know, she could be trying to protect herself from a couple of weirdos who check out catalogs of antique guns, keep bees, and hit her in the head with books."

"I doubt that," Holmes said. He sipped his tea. "She isn't afraid of us. Wary, perhaps, but not afraid. Interested, even."

"Yes. And she totally seemed to understand about us." Joan picked up her medical bag and carried it over to the closet, tucking it back into its corner while Sherlock settled himself in his customary chair. "She said 'I've _had_ a partner.' Does that mean she doesn't anymore?" she mused.

"She has lost her partner, Watson," Sherlock said quietly. Joan looked at him. He stared down into his mug, his brow furrowed.

"How do you know?" she asked, pausing in front of the chair.

"I should have thought it was obvious," he said after a pause, in a more normal tone. "The break of eye contact, the evident discomfort, the hesitation over the choice of past perfect tense - 'I have had.' The look in her eyes. She has lost her partner, and recently."

He was right, of course. Joan had been too surprised by what Dairine had been saying to notice how she had said it. _I have to work on that_ , she thought. _Getting unusual information is no excuse for ignoring the more usual kind_. "Probably still in the process of mourning," she said out loud. She had seen it more often than she liked to think about when she worked in medicine. She wasn't sure how she had missed it here, unless it was just the unexpected context.

"Quite likely," Holmes said. "Denial would be my diagnosis, though of course mourning takes different forms at different stages for any particular person."

"Well, let's try not to pester her about it," Joan said. "She seems the type to talk about it when she's ready and not before. Like some people I know." She smiled wryly. She'd learned that with some people, pushing too hard was sometimes a step backward rather than forward.

"Of course, Watson. I won't go interrogating our guest, no matter how puzzling she is."

"Okay," said Joan. "We should probably go check on her." She started for the stairs.

Sherlock nodded curtly and sprang up from his chair. He would have sloshed tea all over her floor had he not drunk the entire contents of the mug. He followed her back down the stairs.

When they reached the kitchen, they found Dairine with her backpack over one shoulder, washing out her blue mug in the sink. She looked up as Holmes walked past her to pick up the antique gun book again.

"Thanks for the tea and the first aid," she said with a small smile as she turned off the tap. She looked around for a dish towel. Joan pulled a fresh one out of the cabinet and handed it to her; the previous one had been condemned to the rag pile after Sherlock had used it as an impromptu fire extinguisher earlier that morning.

"Of course," Joan said, watching her dry off the mug and put it back in the cabinet. "Thanks for washing your mug, that wasn't necessary."

"Oh, it's no big deal," Dairine said. "I should probably be heading home. Did you want me to put up a few of your honey flyers on my way back? The ones at that platform had all the numbers torn off."

"Oh! Sure, that would be great, actually," Joan said. She walked over to the table where Holmes was bookmarking a page and grabbed a few of the yellow flyers for her. "There you go. Thanks, that's really sweet of you."

"No problem." She took the flyers and stood there awkwardly for a moment, holding the flyers in front of her with both hands. "Well, thanks again." She headed for the foyer. Joan followed her and opened the door for her.

"Farewell, Miss Callahan," Sherlock said from the kitchen.

"Bye," she called back.

"Dairine," Joan said. She looked up at her, a question on her face. "Feel free to stop by for tea anytime, okay?"

"Okay." Dairine nodded. "I will. Bye." She trotted down the front steps of the brownstone and Joan clicked the door closed behind her.

Joan walked back to the kitchen and found Sherlock checking his phone, the book tucked under his arm. "Captain Gregson wants us at the station ASAP, Watson," he said while typing out a most likely indecipherable text response and walking toward the front door.

"Oh. Okay. Hold on," Joan said, grabbing her bag from the counter, pulling her peacoat off its hook by the door and buttoning it hurriedly. Sometimes it was hard to keep up with Holmes' perpetual motion.

"Look sharp, Watson," Sherlock said as he clapped her beret onto her head. "We're about to close a case. Let's go."

The door clattered shut once again, and the brownstone fell into silence.


End file.
